Scout Mania

Inspiration

My inspiration for this project stems from the deep-rooted love that I have for football/soccer. A young kid going to play football in his local ground with the ball at his feet to amaze the world. Football truly is an art in motion if players are given freedom to express themselves. Like this kid, there are million of young artists out there who find their place on the football field and in general, the world through their artistry. Players rise through the ranks overcoming a huge level of competition by playing their natural style of football. This however, is short lived as they later become victims of the inadequate system of player profiling.

Top clubs recruit these youngsters based on their potential and said performances. All the top clubs have a demanding and set-style of play implemented by the manager or the sporting hierarchy. The problem arises when a player completely foreign to the playing-style of a team is forced to forget his roots, the football culture that made him who he is, and try to adapt to a new-style of play. Despite us living in the modern era and having a lot of technological resources to carry out comprehensive analysis of a player and his playing style, miss-profiling is very common and often results in the player loosing confidence in himself and falling out of love with the beautiful game.

About Scout Mania

Scout Mania tries to counter this problem by introducing a new way of analysis in the scouting realm. Scout Mania maintains a database of young talents all around the world. Scouts from around the world are asked to register a player on the database by grading on certain attributes. Many of the attributes are general and seen in everyday football but I have introduced some new attributes of my own that will make the analysis of a player even more concise. Attributes like Movement between the lines, scanning, space identification give a greater idea of what is the play style of the said player. Scouts are highly encouraged to write their own views about the player and his play-style in the general section.

Prototype

I made a short and small prototype using Wix. Scouts can register their talents by entering their personal details, grading their attributes as well as elaborate on the preferred play-style of the player in their own words.

Challenges

There were various challenges and some are still lingering begging to be solved. The first challenge obviously is that a player rating rely heavily on the perception of the scout, hence bringing in a sense of subjectivity. Although scouts are supposed to be unbiased but as humans none of us is perfectly 100% objective. A solution to this would be to dive deeper into the field on analytical data to back up the new stats that I introduced. Stats such as expected goals, expected assists, post shot expected goals, etc. give an even more broader view of a player performance.

Learning Outcomes

I always love to combine my hobbies along with my passion for technology. If you check out my Github page, I made similar projects like Box Office Database (using python-mysql connector that I intend to develop into a full fledged website) combining my love of movies and programming. I am very happy to add another feather to my collection and hope to develop Scout Mania from a simple prototype to something big.

The project-making and the hackathon in general was a great learning experience. My topic in general forced me to think on a deeper and philosophical level that I almost felt I was a football player (I wish LOL!). I learn't more about Wix.com which is a very useful tool in making prototypes and websites. Interacting with fellow hackers and engaging workshops have broadened my technical horizons. I had a great experience and hope to have the same next year as well!

Improvements

Scout Mania is far from perfect. The first thing obviously would be to change the name as I am not good with names. Second would be to integrate Scout Mania with MySQL database to store the data of the players and a good search engine to match the player with managers expectations. I also wish for scout mania to delve into deeper analytical stats (like xG, Xa, etc.) with interactive data visualization.

Built With

• wix